John Toal

Career so far: I started at PSL in 1987 as a salesman. In 1998 I was part of the MBO team that bought PSL and had a whole lot of fun growing that to £150m before we sold it to Bell Micro in 2004. Prior to the acquisition by Avnet last year, I was European president for Bell Micro. I now have the privilege of running the UK and Ireland for Avnet.

If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be and what would you do? Jools Holland. I'd love to play live music with his band and clearly have such a great time doing it.

Cloud - friend or foe? Friend, because whenever there is a change in our industry it creates new opportunity for us all.

Has 2011 been as bad as everyone said it would be? While the economy has had its challenges, I think the IT industry has been pretty robust. Yes, projects slip and are hard to close but I don't remember that every being any different. If companies are going to spend millions of pounds, I guess they will take some time to make decisions.

What would you have as your last meal? The best steak in the world served in a small Swiss hotel in the Alps - a place we stayed at as part of the tour of Mont Blanc walk. I think it tasted even better in the open air and at the end of a hard day's exercise.

Who would you like to be stuck in a lift with? Billy Connelly. He's off the wall and would have plenty of entertaining stories to fill the hours.

Have any of your predictions come true this year? Yes. It would be tough but we would not be back in recession.

What do you see as the channel's biggest challenge in 2012? To embrace the fact that we have to spend more time training and educating our people to be able to engage with business users that are looking for solutions, not products.

What is the best part of your day? Driving to work very early listening to music while working out what my priorities are going to be for the day and the week.